It's Better Living in the Jungle

Milos Forman is the Oscar-winning director of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Amadeus. He has a new movie out about the Spanish painter Goya, Goya's Ghosts. Colin Covert profiles and interviews Forman in the Star Tribune:

He was born in 1932 and lost his Jewish father and Protestant mother to Adolf Hitler's concentration camps. Raised by relatives, he graduated from film school in 1957, making light comedies designed to escape the attention of the Communist state film authority's censors, although they sometimes flirted with antiauthoritarian satire.

When Czech reformers pushing for democratization were crushed by a Soviet-led invasion in 1968, Forman fled to the United States and adjusted quickly to Hollywood's way of doing things, winning Academy Awards for his direction of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" (1975) and "Amadeus" (1984). The battle of individuals against powerful, Kafkaesque institutions is one of Forman's enduring themes, and one he knows firsthand as a filmmaker.

"In Communist society life is like being in a zoo," Forman said. "You are in a cage, literally, with barbed wires and borders. You can't go where you want. But you just have to show yourself; you don't have to work very hard. They feed you and you can't choose the food, but you won't starve. You dream about the beauty and freedom of the jungle."

Moving to the United States, he found "suddenly the bars are broken and you're in the jungle. It's beautiful but dangerous. You're free to go where you like, but you could tumble into a ravine, be bitten by a snake or mauled by a tiger. You thrill to your freedom, but you miss the safety of the zoo."

...Forman said he has observed two kinds of censorship. "In Communist society there was no commercial pressure whatsoever. You didn't have to worry about how much money you spent, but there was very strong ideological constraint, concern that you wouldn't say anything that would upset the political status quo.

"In Hollywood it is exactly the other way," he said. "There is no ideological pressure whatsoever, but tremendous commercial pressure to make money for the people who invested in the film and sell tickets to audiences.

"I prefer to work under commercial pressure rather than ideological pressure. I would rather work under the mercy of an audience of all kinds of people than under the mercy of some idiot in an office worrying about whether what I have created will upset his superiors."